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A Q&A with Gossip Girl's Josh Schwartz

Are you counting down the minutes until Serena, Blair, and their Upper East Side tribe take the screen tonight for this week's episode of the CW's Gossip Girl? If so, tide yourself over with this, the second installment of VF.com's five-part Gossip Girl series. Last Monday we tracked down the cult TV show's costume designers, who were hanging out in the Saks shoe department. This week, VF Daily's Jessica Flint caught up with one of Gossip Girl's executive producers, Josh Schwartz, over the phone as the 31-year-old was playing Frogger through five lanes of traffic in Los Angeles.

VF Daily: You were the genius behind Fox's teenage drama The OC. How does it feel to have another huge hit?

JS: Wow, it feels good when you put it that way! It's really fun. I love to do stuff for this audience. When they're with you, they're incredibly passionate.Why did you think the Gossip Girl books would make a good TV show?

First of all there were 11 of them, so I figured there would probably be at least 11 episodes. But also the crazy following that the books have. I'll never forget when we were shooting the last episode of The OC, we were in a suburban neighborhood in Pasadena that was doubling as Berkeley, and all these kids from the neighborhood came out to meet the cast and say goodbye to the show. I was talking to them, and they were like, "You've got to do another show for us!" And I said, "Well, I'm getting ready to start doing Gossip Girl", and they started screaming. And I thought, "This is good. There's a loyal following here." I was like, "I'm also doing an NBC show called Chuck," and they were all like, "Huh?"

Considering that you were the youngest executive in network history to create a network series, did you learn anything from producing The OC that you applied to Gossip Girl?

I had never worked on a show before I did The OC so I learned it all in a roller-coaster ride of four years—everything from how to produce a show to how to pace yourself with storytelling, to how to utilize characters. And how to make sure you don't lose characters until you've gotten every last drop of good stuff from them. I really learned a wide range of lessons across the board from writing to marketing to production…to crew gifts.

What's your day-to-day involvement with Gossip Girl?

I co-created the show with Stephanie Savage, who is also an executive producer. She was an executive producer on The OC, too. Stephanie really handles the day-to-day, since I'm also producing Chuck. I'm around for the re-writes and editing, and I deal with the network and studio. Hey, you've got to do it all. But I'm really fortunate to get to do this with Stephanie, because she's amazing and does such a great job.

The way Gossip Girl characterizes the Upper East Side is really spot-on. How did you do your research? Or did a lot of that come from the books?

The books are pretty good, but beyond that, Stephanie spent some time in New York on the Upper East Side with some of these girls in real life and got the tour. We have writers who are from that world, so they bring a lot to the writing experience—a lot of flavor and texture that I think that makes it feel accurate in terms of geography, attitude, and tone. And then some of it is fantasy. Because we're not from that world, it gives us a little bit of an outsider perspective, which I think is helpful.

Ideally you want people from that world to feel like we get it right, and people who aren't from that world to feel like they understand it and relate to it even though they haven't experienced it directly. That was our main task when we got to work on bringing the books to life. Plus, we wanted people care about characters despite the fact that they are incredibly rich and not always sympathetic.

What do you think it is about Gossip Girl that has made it a cultural phenomenon?

We're lucky, a lot of the stars aligned. The cast is really terrific and talented, and everybody's right for their parts, aside from being unbelievably attractive.

New York and the Upper East Side seen through the eyes of young people is an exciting and seductive world. The use of technology and the way that these characters have built themselves into a self-inflicted fishbowl where their every action is blogged about, diagnosed, discussed, and gossiped about speaks to the way our celebrity culture is today and also the way people communicate with each other.

Do you have any other projects in the works?

Chuck season two is starting up again, so that will be back on NBC on Monday nights, of all the time slots. And there are a couple of other things that you'll be hearing about soon.